At Home and on Assignment in Guam

Credit Nancy Borowick

At Home and on Assignment in Guam

By James EstrinAug. 23, 2017Aug. 23, 2017

After a year of small-town American life with a twist of tropical island paradise, Nancy Borowick finally felt at home in Guam. She had become a certified underwater scuba diver, picked up needlepoint as a hobby and had taken photos mainly to show her friends and family the unusual mixture of island life and military culture in United States territory.

She had moved there from New York — and paused her busy stateside freelance photo career — when her husband was hired as law clerk to the Guam Supreme Court. She could have pretty much cornered the international freelance photojournalism market there — if any international publications showed interest. They did not: For 11 months she had no assignments. And she was O.K. with that.

Then fate in the form of President Donald J. Trump and North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong-un intervened. On August 8, President Trump threatened to unleash “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against North Korea if the country continued to threaten the United States. Several hours later, North Korea warned that it was considering a strike against Guam and the U.S. military bases located there.

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Rose Fejeran Mateo, 81, has been practicing traditional Chamorro medicine since she was a teenager.Credit Nancy Borowick

That’s when Ms. Borowick’s phone started ringing. Overnight, the world was now interested in the Pacific island.

The first call was from a New York Times photo editor in Hong Kong who arranged to publish some photos from her archive in the next day’s paper and then put her on assignment.

The floodgates opened. Within the next 24 hours, more than 30 publications contacted Ms. Borowick via email, phone and social media, she said. Now with more assignment possibilities than ever, she had to demur since she was working for The Times.

When she set out to see how island residents were reacting to the threats, she found that life was continuing just as it had the day before. Tourists were still on the beach “swimming around in their plastic flamingo floaties,” she said, and the sunsets continued to be Kodachrome-perfect. No one seemed worried.

Perhaps that was because the indigenous Chamorro people had already “survived a lot,” she said, including Spanish colonial rule, U.S. Navy administration and a brutal Japanese occupation and concentration camps in World War II. Or maybe the U.S. military presence helped assure residents.

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Friends and family get together at the Perez family ranch. Justice Robert J. Torres gets the grill ready for lunch.Credit Nancy Borowick

Since there was little visible news, her editors encouraged her to just tell the stories she was seeing. So she set out to document this unusual island she had come to love.

“I know that I briefly have this opportunity, a platform to talk about Guam now that people are more curious,” she said. “I feel a great responsibility to do right by the community and tell authentic, not exoticized, stories.”

She’s photographed the high school football team, a birthday barbecue on the beach, residents going to church, and a tourist destination wedding. And there was the time she got up close and personal with a B1 bomber.

“Guam has all the workings of life on the mainland — there are even traffic jams — but the difference is you usually have a view of a beautiful sunset or rainbow from your car,” she said. “The pace of life is slower, and people are very warm and have their priorities in the right place. And it’s a very diverse place with people from all over.”

For two days, Ms. Borowick and the local photographers on contract with Guam’s newspapers had the island pretty much to themselves. But then the international media started pouring in: An idyllic sunset stroll on the beach with her husband was interrupted by a CNN crew.

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A wedding photo shoot along Tumon Bay in Guam. Many tourists from Japan and South Korea come to the island for destination weddings.Credit Nancy Borowick

Ms. Borowick has continued to photograph Guam’s daily life, although she knows the world’s interest will soon shift elsewhere. She will return to her own quiet, uneventful existence. She is even looking forward to it.

Ms. Borowick’s book on her parents’ struggle with terminal cancer was published last year after the story appeared on Lens. Her time in Guam, she said, has allowed her to step back and reflect on her parents’ deaths. Now she will dedicate herself to making a new documentary book — about Guam, so the world can know the lessons she learned on the Island.

“I’ve learned what real community looks and feels like and that there are many ways that you can prepare spam, an island favorite,” she said. ‘I’ve gotten to know military people in a different way and learned what American pride looks like, as well as the pride of a people who have been through many wars and many types of devastation over the course of their history, yet still prevail, so I’ve learned about strength.

“I’ve also learned that there’s a whole world beneath the surface of the ocean since I started scuba diving”